A Long Way to Go to Catch Google

A search on "pizza, Fairfield, Ct." returned local pizzerias along with a Yahoo Map offering directions to five restaurants. This is very valuable.
A search for "cancer" shows a similar setup for results, but with
a key change: A Categories section appears atop the Expanded Searches and
Twitter boxes in the right-hand rail, offering to take users to Websites with
information on cancer causes, treatments, statistics and more.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing and semantic search providers offer some of
what Yebol aims to offer in total. For example, Google boasts great scale, but
it does not rely on a bulk of semantic search to achieve it, nor does it
surface Twitter tweets. Bing indexes Twitter tweets, and, like Hakia and
Kosmix, it provides semantic search.

But none of them currently cover as much ground on the Web from a semantic
standpoint as Yebol will be able to do in November, Landis claimed. The company
actually has all of the terms indexed, but is refining the visual presentation
of them, he said. The real-time capabilities ensure that Yebol's index will
grow at a prodigious rate.
When it comes to other search engines, "They've all got X number of
search terms, usually one- and two-word search terms that they have been able
to create algorithms for that scour the Internet for related topics and give
you additional information for that search term outside of just the PageRank
lists [from Google]," Landis said.
Yet Landis claimed that is no longer how users are searching. For example,
before users became so reliant on search engines like Google, they conducted
basic one or two-word searches such as "Tom Cruise." Today, Landis
argued, users search for more complex queries, such as "Tom Cruise Katie
Holmes fight."
But this all depends on context. While it is true that users are conducting
more complex searches on Google, Bing and other engines, there are still plenty
of basic keyword searches piping through search engines. Indeed, a user looking
for biographical information on the actor may likely enter "Tom
Cruise."
Even so, Landis said Yebol will provide semantic search results for searches
that span entire paragraphs in length. Yet even if Yebol pulls this off, it has
no well-lighted path to success, as few search engine startups prosper in
Google's massive shadow.
For example, Cuil launched in 2008 but has hardly made a dent. Bing, thanks
to Microsoft's brand and $100 million marketing push, is gaining some market share, although at 8.9 percent it is well
behind Google's roughly 65 to 70 percent share of the market.